Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) explained Wednesday that he voted against a scaled-down ObamaCare repeal bill last week because people in his home state would be deeply hurt by the measure.

“Arizona was about to get screwed, if I may, under this plan,” McCain told Phoenix-based radio host Mike Broomhead.

McCain said that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a fellow Republican, had asked him to push for three amendments in order to make the measure acceptable for the state to adopt.

Arizona is facing “very serious problems,” McCain said, listing higher premiums and deductibles as well as having only one insurer in the state’s healthcare marketplace.

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Republican leaders hoped passing a pared-down ObamaCare repeal bill would allow members of the House and Senate to continue to work on a broader healthcare reform measure in a conference between both chambers.

“I had no input frankly as to how it was going to be fixed except to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ once it came out of the conference,” he told Broomhead, adding that the conference would be “short-circuiting” the process of amending the legislation through repeated committee hearings and debates.

McCain praised Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top members of the Senate Health Committee, for their plan to hold bipartisan hearings next month on how to stabilize and strengthen ObamaCare’s individual insurance market.

“That is the way it should proceed,” he said about the Health Committee’s plan to discuss the issue of “collapsing markets.”

The panel announced the efforts as Senate Republican leaders openly indicated they were unsure of their next steps on healthcare after a repeal bill failed to pass in the upper chamber on Friday.

McCain cast the crucial vote to kill the pared-down ObamaCare repeal measure, known as a “skinny” bill. He joined GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) in rejecting the measure. Fellow Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake (R), who is up for reelection in 2018, voted for the bill.